I doubt that pay at the pump has made that much of a difference to the stores. A person who goes into the store twice a year to buy soda is going to do that whether it’s pay at the pump or not , and the same goes for someone who stops every day to buy coffee. The have the pumps to attract customers, but that doesn’t mean the customers only stop when they need gas.
5 cents per gallon, might not be much, but some of these places are very high volume. I’ll bet 100k gallons a day is not unusual, maybe on the low side. 5k per day gross profit is pretty good. The closest place to buy gas near me has 24 pumps. I frequently have to wait to get to pump. I usually buy 20+ gallons at a time. The convenience store has a steady traffic, usually have to wait inside as well.
I recall when gas hit $4 a gallon it turns out some pumps would not go beyond ~$75 at a time. Which meant people buying 20 gallons or more had to stop and then start up again putting their card back into the pump. Some stations bumped up the limit over $75 but not all did.
I think that estimate is high. A gas tank truck holds around 10k gallons, so that would mean 10 gas trucks a day coming in–not something I’m used to seeing.
Visa and Mastercard used to have a $75 authorization limit for gas stations. If a gas station let you pump more than that, a few unscrupulous banks would charge back the station owners (which the rules allowed them to do) and still charge the cardholder for the purchase. So stations that allowed you to pay more than $75 with a credit card did so at their own risk.
Visa has increased the cap to $125 since then. I don’t know about Mastercard.
Where do the pumps go? They end up on the street. You’ll see them at freeway offramps, holding up signs begging for a half gallon of unleaded to feed their kids. A pitiful sight, indeed.
“Will pump for gas”
Ouch! If it was closed that long ago, they might have closed it by filling the tanks with sand, rather than taking them out. We can hope that they pumped the remaining gas out of it first.
According to my father, who spent 25 years sourcing gasoline for retail sale, stations often sell gas below cost, as a loss leader; as Joey P says, the real profit’s in the Mountain Dew and bag of Doritos you picked up on a whim.
FWIW, my dad’s career ended about 15 years ago, so gas might not be a loss leader any longer; but the real profit center of a gas station remains the C-store.
I see an awful lot of old pumps (I’m talking about the external, mostly vertical structure with a fillup hose) used for decoration like other antiques and period items. A neighbor of mine, who made his fortune in Texas oil, has one outside his garage, inoperative (I hope). He has antique player pianos and other expensive artifacts inside, so it all makes sense.
I would change that just a tiny bit - the profit center is whatever they do besides selling gas. I have never seen a gas station that *just *sold gas except maybe on a tolled highway -they always have either a convenience store or a repair shop or sometimes a warehouse store. It’s almost ridiculous to call them gas stations - it would be more accurate to call convenience stores/repair shops that sell gas.
AIUI, many of the old tanks are just steel, slowly rusting away. The remediation cost isn’t so much simply pulling them out, but cleaning up all the gasoline-contaminated soil around them, sometimes for quite a distance. Newer tanks are fiberglass and double-walled, so are much less likely to be a problem. Still, it’s easy for a developer to just find a different site and not worry about it.
This isn’t true in Chicago. There’s a fair handful of gas stations here where the “store” is more like a 10’x10’ indoor booth surrounded by pumps. They have some items like pop and chips and motor oil, but barely more than you’d get from a couple vending machines. People occasionally go in, but I don’t think they’re making a lot of cash on the store items. I’ve always kinda wondered how these ones work, economically.
OTOH …
Going the other way until recently there was a long abandoned old gas station near us. A house for the business and where the owner lived. A simple concrete block tiny garage. And a couple classic pumps. Ones with those “bubble” sign tops that imitated the still older cylinder top ones.
So I guess way back when some stations owned their pumps.
(It’s now a giant Quik Stop. A corner’s a corner.)
This is, at best, marginally related but years ago, I went to a warehouse for work. Several of the racks were loaded up with old ATMs. They were clearly obsolete: very small displays, no touchscreens, probably monochrome. These machines were almost certainly never going to be used again. Yet here were dozen of them, dusty and growing ever older in a dark warehouse. It seemed sort of like those aircraft boneyards in the desert. The equipment is too expensive to write off so it’s stored until depreciation catches up with the scrap value.
I have not seen this mentioned above but I wonder how often the pumps are removed simply to protect them from vandalism and or theft? Pumps are expensive and vulnerable to abuse. In some cases, I wonder if the owner removes them but takes them no farther than the protected interior of the store/station?
Kroger gas stations are like that. There’s a cooler box with soda and a box with chips next to the cashier’s security booth.
Slide the $$$ through the security window and you can buy gas or the soda & chips.
I dislike that security booth. I’m out here unprotected pumping gas and you need a security booth to do your job?
https://goo.gl/images/7SFd9H
Set designers might also want them on occasion for period TV shows and movies.
I do remember that my brother LOVED pay at the pump when his kids were little, because he didn’t have to get them out to pay for his gas.
For a while, Walmart had an experiment where they had stores that were basically convenience stores with a gas station and a pharmacy. My BFF worked at one of those pharmacies for a while, and actually liked it. They then discontinued this concept and laid him off.
AIUI, your cleanup responsibilities don’t end at the property line – you have to clean up wherever the plume went. That’s how cleanup costs can snowball on you.
We had Esso (and Enco and Enjay) over here (USA) too until the merger to Exxon in the 70’s. Our Canadian neighbors still have Esso.